Guest post by Steven Goddard
Wikipedia Image of Disaster Movie poster
While volcanic ash falls on Britain, in yet another assault on reason, the Royal Society has warned :
In papers published by the Royal Society, researchers warned that melting ice, sea level rises and even increasingly heavy storms and rainfall – predicted consequences of rising temperatures – could affect the Earth’s crust.
I also watched the movies 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, but apparently I didn’t take them as seriously as some – Zombieland was probably more realistic.
As the land ”rebounds” back up once the weight of the ice has been removed – which could be by as much as a kilometre in places such as Greenland and Antarctica – then if, in the worst case scenario, all the ice were to melt – it could trigger earthquakes. The increase in seismic activity could, in turn, cause underwater landslides that spark tsunamis. A potential additional risk is from ”ice-quakes” generated when the ice sheets break up, causing tsunamis which could threaten places such as New Zealand, Newfoundland in Canada and Chile.
Pleeezzz …. Even if these claims worth worth considering, it would take tens or hundreds of thousands of years for Greenland and Antarctica to melt.
Back in the real world we hear from the Icelandic Meteorological Service that the glacier is what is causing the ash :
Einar Kjartansson, a geophysicist at the Meteorological Office.believes the volcano has melted about 10 percent of the glacier
It still could take months for the volcano to burn through the rest of the glacier, to a point where the steam and ash would turn instead into lava, he said.
What he is saying is that the sooner the glacier melts, the sooner the volcanic hazards will subside. This must be tough to swallow for people who believe that world is better off when it is cold and icy.
file under ‘spooking your dna’
http://www.geos.ed.ac.uk/homes/s0456225/Storegga.html
rbateman (19:41:20) :
2012 was entertaining as Sci Fi, and I do like Science Fiction, but when the movie is over, it’s back to the real world. The part I didn’t like is how the 2 Russian characters had to die. The bad people are supposed to eat it, not the good guys.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This.
Despite its obvious propaganda purposes, I actually enjoyed The Day After Tomorrow. As disaster flicks go, it had all the elements of a good film. But, it is, was, and always will be fiction.
I like Cusack as an actor, and will see 2012, because I enjoy good disaster yarns. I have to hold my nose a bit though, as Cusack is a bit of a liberal loon. I could have gone without the two-russians-dying spoiler though. 😉
I wondered how long it would take before this volcano is intertwined into global warming folklore as Kiliminjaro, the Polar ice cap, the Amazon and the Great Barrier reef.
I was thinking atmospheric effects being argued for years on end. Kinda threw me with the ‘ooh the heavy ice is melting and the crust is bouncing back’.
My inability to think out of the box like that must be the reason I don’t have a Phd and try and frighten governments for a living.
If the glaciers melt, forget earthquakes. The real danger is that continents may capsize as the weigth balance shifts. More research is needed…
/sarcasm
Carl Fogel (21:34:16) :
Regarding the wolverine as the largest terrestrial weasel, the largest member of the weasel family is either the Amazon river otter or the sea otter.
——–
If you don’t include Al Gore.
and relatedly, remember this one
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hvDhvPm9l5fHqiHIU5uc6Gpzs-MAD9F4C2NG0
pat (19:16:38) : Is it ambivalence and apathy? Or are people paralyzed by feelings of anxiety and helplessness? What are the biggest barriers to individual’s taking action?
Perhaps it’s just that most people are a bit smarter than your average climate scientist (or psycho analyst) 😉
Hey, we’ve seen a lot scarier stuff from Hollyweird. They’re gonna need better special effects than a crummy blood red map if they want people to get excited. Also some stuffed bikinis and buff guys in torn shirts… Oh, and a DVD on Amazon with the out takes and some ‘directors cut’ material…
We must look at the reasons people are not acting in order to understand how to get people to act.
Well, I am acting… just not they way they want…
Northern Exposure (20:07:55) : Have I awoken to find myself in the Dark Ages ??
Not quite yet… About 10 more years to go. We’ve got to get to Phase Two of the Solar Extinction Grand Major Minimum … then the Barycentric Solar Oscillations will cause the earth to tip over as the Magnetic Pole shift happens due to the Electric Universal Field pressure on it… But there is still time to prepare. For only $4000 I will prepare and ship to you a Doomsday Survival Kit including dried grains, two shaped stones to grind flour, one pot, and a tarp for catching rain water. Oh, and matches too…
It seems I’m now living in the era of doom and gloom.
If it snows, it means we’re in trouble.
If it rains, it means we’re in trouble.
If it’s dry, it means we’re in trouble.
If it’s hot, it means we’re in trouble.
…
It’s a horrible death we’re all facing here folks :
I think it’s because monkeys are distant relatives of Rabbits… No, honestly.
We, as apes, are lacking in a decent tail. Bunnies have very short tails.
Onions are poison to many species, but people can eat them. My bunnies like to much on the green onions from time to time.
We have large “hind legs” as do bunnies.
Even the human appendix is a vestigial form of the ‘hind gut fermenter’ organ in bunnies (you don’t want to know how hind gut ruminants get the added vitamins and nutrients from that process effectively into their stomachs… makes you want to throw things at our proto-ancestors… but explains the use of ambergris in perfume… )
So I’d assert that we, like bunnies, are just hypervigilant about all the evil things that want to eat us or kill us…
My “free range bunnies” KNOW I’m the “bringer of food”. For at least 2 years I do nothing but bring food and water and make sure they are happy. They STILL run for cover at my approach… (though now they stop about 10 feet away and WATCH me put food in the bin… and run up at my departure …)
So just think of people as giant bunnies with no tail at all and stupid little round ears and it all makes sense…
Sadly, only the part before the bunny story is humor…
Patrick Davis (21:18:13) : It’s very intereting to read that the UK Met Office is using computer models to shut flights down. I hear on the news a second volcano has erupted.
A second on in Iceland? Or somewhere else?
OT, but in Western Astralia, we’ve had another quake, big-ish one too.
I’ve got a “live quake map” up at:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/04/19/quakes-a-bottoms-up-view/
The Perth area quake looks to be a 5.2 range. PNG was a 6.2, but that was a couple of days ago…
http://www.smh.com.au/wa-news/kalgoorlie-rocked-by-50-quake-20100420-sqay.html
As the Public ”rebounds” back up once the weight climate alarmism has been removed – which could be by as much as a kilometer in places such as US and UK – then if, in the worst case scenario, all the PNS were to melt – it could trigger serious voter backlash. The increase in skeptic activity could, in turn, lead to valid science that could spark tsunamis of voter outrage. A potential additional risk is from ”fact-quakes” generated when the alarmist lies are exposed in new media, causing waves of enlightenment across the internet which could threaten socialist governments in places such as US, UK and Australia.
I hope it will trigger Scotland to separate from England, ;-}
“E.M.Smith (23:01:46) :
A second on in Iceland? Or somewhere else?”
I believe it was on Iceland, but I am not entirely sure, it was early (I was abruptly woken by the local fire department safety checkers doing their annual safety check on the apartment) and I caught the tail end of a newscast.
Might get more news tonight but I also vaguely recall a story/article of a volcano breaking the sea surface somewhere in the Pacific recently too.
My attempt at post-normal science:
When I inhale, my chest rises.
Therefore:
When the land rises, the earth will inhale. There will be a sucking sound out to sea, a huge whirlpool, and supertankers will be slurped down to their doom.
Could I have some funding please?
I want to make a docu-drama: “The Day The Earth Inhaled.”
when George Bush invented the axis of evil – North Korea, Iran and Iraq, who would have thought that Greenpeace, the WWF and the Royal Society would turn into such a danger for freedom, prosperity and humanity ?
The theroy is obviously that AGW causes volcanos and that without it no volcanos would ever occur again. If a volcano does erupt then it proves AGW.
The Digital Tectonic Activity Map (DTAM).
@ur momisugly ML (20:35:55) :
you may want to try:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_(programming_language)
http://burks.bton.ac.uk/burks/language/ml/
Ah well… if nothing else, it’s another one for The List!
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/warmlist.htm
When you have a volcano, inept politicians and eurocrats AND post-normal Met scientists against you…
…you know it’s not the time to be in the tourism business.
Royal Society?
Or do you mean Royal Psychopaths?
Just which one of the doom laden disasters forecast for the Earth over the last 2,000 years has actually happened? Just why is it that they are all set for some way off future point where they are completely unvalidated! It’s called soothsaying I believe.
Al Gored: “The Simpsons and that episode was brilliant. And more credible than this absurd wolf crying from Monty Python’s Royal Society.”
Al Gored that is a huge slur on Monty Python!
I think the accusation of “bandwagon-jumping” is unfounded. A publication such as this one must have been prepared long before the current focus precipitated by the volcanic eruption in Iceland.
I notice a Royal Society gets praised when it criticises the statistical methods of the CRU; another one attracts obloquy (with no scientific criticism) when it merely publishes scientific papers supporting the GW case. Surely the papers stand or fall by their scientific content, not by wearing a pro- or anti- GW “jersey”.
Someone’s biases are showing.
R Craigen writes ” … isostatic rebound is a SLOW process (thousands of years), and as far as I understand it, the process RELIEVES underground pressure rather than exacerbating it.”
From the Latin roughly, “iso” = “same”, “stasis” = “standstill”. Earth isostasy is a process achieved by a balanced state of pressure in the shallow earth’s crust. Pressure relief in one area means pressure increase in another, if one assumes an equilibrium to be present (it might not be, because of lag). Think of walking on a waterbed.
Silly question. Would not rebounding land counteract rising sea levels caused by melting ice?
Ashes to ashes,
Fun to funky,
We know Major Tom’s a junkie….